


A Promising Future (?)

by The_Exile



Series: Skure Crisis [4]
Category: Phantasy Star II
Genre: Bureaucracy, Gen, Pre-Canon, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 10:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2021337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A not particularly serious or canonical story of the Podhead robot in charge of Skure and his multiple failed attempts to set the mining operation up in different locations around Algol before settling on Dezolis. Mostly written to deposit several crack ideas, and because the details come up in a couple of my fics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Promising Future (?)

Motavia

Podhead-52 watched a pillar of sand erupt almost straight upwards, blasting the camera and obscuring his visibility for a moment. He recorded the force of the tremors, gurgling, screeching roars combined with a force that tore apart the ground. The force of the tremors themselves had been enough to tear out the foundations of the rig and knock over the platform. He watched the human and mechanical staff members alike fleeing in terror as the ravenous maw burst out of the ground, little more than a tube lined in all directions with razor-sharp teeth that could swallow the entire facility at once, shortly followed by the leathery hide of the rest of the sandworm, its undulating movement across the dunes raising sandstorms in its wake.

He sighed and crossed out another line on the image of a clipboard he used to represent his Command Link Module in real time across the overhead display on the 'head' of his pod. Yet another excavation site unsuitable, once again because of a sudden increase in sandworm activity. If it wasn't sandworms, it was antlions. The vibrations from the drilling equipment immediately woke them up and agitated them, as soon as the facility was switched on. Podhead 52 had been informed that the two highly dangerous species had been eliminated from the Motavian ecosystem by a combination of Motherbrain's terraforming programme that slowly tamed the harsh environments they were native to, and extensive genetic manipulation of all species on Motavia. The Podhead command unit was the first lucky individual to find out that they had simply moved further underground, conveniently far enough down that they would not show up on Motherbrain's peripheral scans or cause enough disturbance to make her come looking for them, but still close enough to the surface for deep mining operations to incite them into a spontaneous berserk frenzy. Added to this, the remote wilderness where they could still survive and the exact depth where they seemed to thrive the best, was also the most productive place to mine for Laconia.

He struck from the staff roster those who had chosen to flee in the wrong direction and who had been swallowed up by the ferocious beast. There were surprisingly few casualties. By now, his staff were used to everything going wrong for them. A steady decline in morale had lost him half his human workforce, which was just as well, as he was running out of money to employ them. After his recent spate of failures, Motherbrain's Bureau of Industry was not about to give him more funding or assign more robots to his team. His diplomatically unwise choice – to blame the Research Bureau for spending all their time making even more of a hash job of the Biosystems lab, that they couldn't even notice a nest of sandworms until it was literally directly underneath them – also didn't gain him any more favour.

“The fact of the matter is,” Twigtall-17, the Director of the Bureau of Industry, told him, “All you have managed to demonstrate is that Laconia cannot be mined on Dezolis without destroying more resources than it creates.”

“But a steady supply of Laconia would be…”

“Have you yet succeeded in bringing back a steady supply of anything except repair bills?”

The Podhead paused for a second, the lights on the front of his panel blinking red in irritation. A systems report made a noise like a slightly stuck computer fan, “No, you are right, there are no suitable sites on Motavia.”

“So, you agree to repurpose as a…”

“Therefore, I will take my operation into space. Recent scans from the Interstellar Bureau revealed a high concentration of minerals that could well be Laconia in the asteroid field around the former site of planet Palma,” Podhead-52 wasn't an old enough model of android to remember the existence of Algol's third, most verdant planet but there was still a wealth of information on the topic in Motherbrain's archives. Restricted from the public, of course, but the security forces did not question the movements of the Command Units as a rule: they were too busy with important work to be interrupted.

“You would never obtain funding…”

“Observation of the asteroid belt is a difficult and dangerous endeavour. I will allow some of my storage space to be replaced with scanning equipment.”

“You have no idea what's actually there and you're just guessing it won't destroy you and your entire operation, you mean,” said Sonomech-17.

“At least, as far as I am aware, there is no such thing as space sandworms.”

Palma 

The first time the sensors began detecting life forms, he was vaguely curious but assumed it was a false reading, either from faulty equipment or magnetic interference. None of the cameras on the mining drones were picking up anything visible in the belt other than asteroids, other drones and his own command ship, never mind anything that could be interpreted as a life form. The belt had been peaceful and extremely profitable. Until the night they had been hit by a lightning storm that manifested from, as far as the sensors could make out, absolutely nowhere, followed swiftly by a swarm of grotesque monstrosities that resembled no life form that had ever existed on Motavia.

Some resembled giant floating stone statues, shaped like pairs of vaguely humanoid heads that were fused together, others less corporeal, the sensors registering massive levels of technique energy whenever they appeared. Others appeared only briefly in the Universe, only their leathery black skin and pinpoint glowing eyes visible, before disappearing, travelling instantaneously using tiny wormholes, to appear somewhere else and drag one of his drones into the void with a single gigantic clawed tentacle. At the head of the army was another apparition – a hologram, probably generated using some kind of technique rather than an ordinary mechanical communications device, Podhead-52 realised. Vaguely resembling a tall, extremely elderly male Palman in appearance, he wore heavy golden armour and a style of crimson robes that the Command Unit vaguely remembered seeing in a thousand year old historical record. The hologram, as expected, did not register as a life form, but neither did the origin point, the sender, once the signal had been intercepted and traced back.

Pointing the technique-enhancing rod he carried at the Podhead's display unit in a threatening gesture, he announced in a wizened, arrogant voice, “How dare you disturb the eternal domain of King Lashiec with your infernal racket! Begone this instant or know the true extent of my wrath!”

“I apologise, I had no idea this place was occupied,” said Podhead-52, sending a signal back to the archives demanding to know who or what a 'Lashiec' was and why it was randomly attacking asteroid miners, “Where is your station? Is it properly registered? Did I intrude upon someone else's mining operation?”

“The Risen King of Algol does not dig in the dirt like a worm!” he snarled, his face contorting in outrage. Another peal of thunder boomed in the distance and a surge of lightning took out another five drones before the Podhead could tell them to move. Meanwhile, a message had come back refusing him access to the archives until further notice and demanding to know why he was researching such forbidden topics that they required a security clearance even above the Command Units.

King Lashiec swept his arms back theatrically, “If you would stay, I demand tribute! I hereby decree that mining permits are ten million meseta per week!”

“That is extortionate! Nobody can afford that much! If you weren't even mining it yourself, why would you charge me for supplying you with…” the Podhead began protesting, but then the twin-headed statues began firing lasers out of their mouths to drown him out. The Sonomech at Archives was still complaining at him over his communications channel back home. He gave the order to retreat at full speed.

Rykros 

He was saved from utter bankruptcy by the fact that Motherbrain had taken a sudden interest in his sightings among the asteroids. The footage he had managed to record of his encounters with the entity called 'Lashiec' had proven valuable, as well as the knowledge that it was hostile, possibly over a thousand years old, ambiguously alive and charged a fortune for mining permits. Podhead-52 used the funding to begin another expedition into deep space. After all, he had managed to extract a large amount of valuable ore even in the short time before he was driven off, compressed in the ancient dead rocks which had been left undisturbed for unimaginable lengths of time. The solar system was a big place and it couldn't all be full of insane necromancers.

The Interstellar Bureau suggested that he investigate the strange signal that the deep space observation satellite had been picking up with increasing clarity every day. Located on the very edge of the solar system, the source of the signal was undetectable in every other way except that it seemed to take up a large amount of volume and mass. By now, he had a reputation for wanting to explore the most dangerous areas of space, so he had been volunteered for the expedition before he actually had a say in the matter. Mineral scans of the area had suggested the presence of large amounts of an unknown crystalline mineral that was probably valuable simply due to its novelty.

Getting to the other side of the solar system had taken the better part of a week and the newly assembled replacement drone fleet had been forced to take several stops just to find more fuel. The fact that this process hadn't resulted in their immediate destruction had been taken as a good omen.

At the very least, this was already going differently to last time.

The initial scans showed no life forms and continued to show no life forms as they entered the planet's atmosphere. This reassured the Podhead as he looked for the least unsuitable place to land. The new batch of drones had been modified so that they could operate on a variety of possible planetary surfaces, as the sheer size of the object on the scanners suggested something closer to a planet than an asteroid, but they didn't really expect there to be anywhere to safely land. Podhead-52 was surprised to find such a clear landing strip within the first hour of searching. It seemed almost purpose built. It wasn't the only structure that looked artificial – some outcrops even had the appearance of primitive towers - although there were no actual signs of habitation and the scanners continued to report absolutely no signs of life among the endless expanses of lime green and pink crystalline rock. Artificial-looking features were not the most bizarre phenomena on the planet – some strips of rock even floated on the wind, seemingly with nothing supporting them, lending more credence to the theory that the planet was under artificial gravity. Maybe there had been another interplanetary mining operation here that failed, thought the Podhead. It was certainly mineral rich enough to interest any spacefaring civilisation and although there was no way to sustain life, the atmosphere and pressure weren't hostile to life, making it even more curious that nothing biological had evolved yet.

Despite his curiosity, it wasn't until he turned on the extractors – yet again – that he noticed the landscape rippling and shifting around him. Maybe the change just hadn't been rapid or extreme enough before they disturbed the silence…

He never reported back that the planet was sentient, one giant crystalline life form, or that other living geological features roamed its surface, serving its goals. It had been the condition for his release, the only survivor of the planet's retaliation. The planet had told him – he still had no idea how it had actually talked to him, having no means of speech or electronic communication – that it would go better for him if he didn't report the planet's existence, never mind that it was intelligent or had goals of its own, as Motherbrain would not approve of him possessing such knowledge. He had not been told anything further. Considering the bureaucratic hurdles he had been forced to jump through just to avoid a memory wipe after the Lashiec incident, he didn't want to test whether the planet was lying or not.

He hadn't been told anything else about the planet but he had managed to calculate that its orbit led outwards, away from Algol. Eventually it wouldn't be there, hopefully for a long time, by which the whole incident would have been forgotten and he would probably have already been destroyed in another mining accident. He invented a cover story about an unstable black hole interfering with the station's signals and suggested the whole area be quarantined.

By the time he returned to Motavia, the defence fleet were reporting back from the asteroid belt. From the condition that the survivors were in, Podhead-52 surmised that the campaign hadn't gone well. He took care to avoid them, in case it was something he could potentially be blamed for or asked questions about.

Dezolis

The more that he thought about it, the more he realised that Dezolis had been the logical choice from the beginning. It had only taken him three disastrous failures, several hundred mining drones, a four million meseta clone lab bill from the Paseo Miner's Union (the permit would still have been more expensive!) and the suggestion of an intelligent planet to think of setting up on Algol's second planet. He had assumed that the snow and ice storms, the precipitous terrain, the notoriously vicious wild animals and unfriendly natives would end up wrecking his operation again. Dezolis could not be tamed: every effort to terraform the planet or even build the necessary infrastructure to give Palmans in self-contained colonies a decent standard of life had failed. However, the planet was at least habitable. Now that a clone lab and data memory bank had been successfully installed, Palmans could legally be brought to Dezolis, and the small expeditions teams had mostly been entirely shunned by the natives. The giant owls and thick-haired elephants were smaller than sandworms and only rarely lived underground. The very fact that Dezolis was so arid and so many regions were completely isolated meant that there was an almost untapped supply of Laconia ore, in places where a large scale mining operation wouldn't bother anyone. The space port was close to the proposed mining site so that equipment and staff could be transported without too much trouble. As long as the equipment was made sturdy enough to withstand the cold, Dezolis was perfect. His proposal was accepted with relative ease and he was given permission to use the space shuttle, together with a fresh supply of robots, heavily armoured, armed against dangerous wild animals and tested under extreme cold conditions, and a licence to hire staff. The Palman miners seemed excited at the thought of living as pioneers on a different planet in a groundbreaking revolution in space industry, especially when they found out that they got paid double and they never had to go back to where the sandworms were, so it didn't take him long to find recruits. Within years, a few small towns had even been set up, a chain of general supply stores and medical facilities joining the necessary clone banks and data memory. Occasionally there were even sightings of the locals. Laconia trade was becoming viable once more. For once in his career as the Command Robot for the Mining Division of the Motherbrain Network's Industry Bureau, life was becoming routine and normal. Refreshingly so.

Le Roof occasionally felt bad about what He had done to the strange-looking robot who, despite a millennium of advances in technology and the lack of any non-hostile, non-incendiary trees left in the Motavian ecosystem, had an image of a clipboard on his display screen. He hadn't been the true enemy and didn't seem to be much of a master of his own fate. He didn't even have proper legs - not that this seemed to stop Dark Force wreaking untold devastation upon the solar system. The Guardian of Algol's Knowledge was even impressed by his dedication at improving the quality of life for Algol's people. It was something about his attitude – his casual assumption that he had permission to assault Le Roof with excavation equipment, his unquestioning loyalty to Motherbrain, that annoying beeping noise he kept making when startled – that made the Voice of Rykros want to mess with him a little. Added to that, it would be a blow to Motherbrain. It was difficult to move against the immense threat to Algol without alerting Her to the presence of Rykros and she had a large enough army to do a considerable damage if she invaded, especially as Dark Force, possibly also Lashiec, were also alive and active, and no known Protectors had arisen for a worrying length of time. It was as if what was wrong with Algol had permeated the solar system at too fundamental a level not to have an impact on its cycle of fate. Alis had been forgotten; the people of Algol were no longer the same. Soon, it would be impossible to rely on the old prophecies. The fact that an automated mining operation, rather than a destined warrior of Algol, had been the most recent visitor to the Planet of Fables, only reiterated this fact.

Still, Le Roof felt a little sorry for what He had done. Just a little.


End file.
